Why There’s No Such Thing as Coincidence with Your Child’s Behaviour

This may come as a shock to you but your child is never “just being naughty”. There’s always a reason why.To understand why your child is behaving a certain way you must get to the root of what’s causing it in the first place. So how do we go about doing that? By looking deeper.

At the very core of who we are lie layers upon layers of stories and beliefs we have created for ourselves. Those beliefs come from the experiences we have throughout life, especially in childhood. Every time we go through similar experiences, it triggers the emotion felt the first time around. If we have no way of processing, healing and releasing the emotion, those beliefs become reinforced, no matter how untrue they may be. When we hold onto emotions, we attract more of those experiences in to give us extra opportunities to heal. To help you understand this, here are some examples from my own life.

There was my 5 and a half-month-old baby, Dexter, and I in my car when we had a car accident. It had happened in June, a month after my birthday. Luckily, everyone involved walked away but it was, of course, traumatic for the both of us. It took a lot of work for us to process what had happened, and I thought that we had. 7 years later, 4 days after my birthday, I had another car accident. This time 10-month-old Violet was my passenger. Dexter got very scared and angry about it. We hadn’t processed the trauma from the first accident. The triggering of it all gave us another chance to release what we were still holding onto.

When Dexter was 3 years old and at nursery, two other boys bullied him. They told him again and again that he wasn’t old enough to be their friend and excluded him from their play. This led Dexter to form very strong beliefs about what friendship was and what his place was in the world. We did plenty of remodelling work with him to prevent this belief from impacting his life in the long-term (although I am sure that the emotion will resurface again for further work when he’s 10!). Isn’t that just kids being kids? Yes and no -young children can often seem quite cruel, mirroring what they see out in the world. But “small” interactions like this make up their whole world and for that reason, it can have a massive impact.

Dexter had a traumatic birth which included me having an episiotomy. When I was pregnant with Violet, Dexter asked me, “When the baby comes out of your tummy, are they going to rip you open?”. I asked, “Is that how it felt for you?”. He said, “yes, and I was stuck. They ripped you open and I thought you were dead, so I didn’t breathe”. It would be easy to pass that off as a 5 (at the time) year old’s vivid imagination. But what Dexter was describing there were my episiotomy and his experience of it. He brought it up because my pregnancy with his sister triggered his held emotion. It resulted in him developing a fear of me dying in childbirth.

I went through a 7-year-cycle last year. I remembered something from when I was 19 months old that I didn’t even know had happened. Violet started recreating my reaction when she was 19 months old, despite not going through the same experience. But because it was in my energy field and the emotions were there, she picked up on it.

But how can our children be triggered by something that hasn’t even happened to them? How can we prevent our children holding onto difficult emotions? Is there a way to stop a Little One creating negative beliefs about themselves? And what is the significance of 7-year-cycles?